This application is based upon and claims the benefit of priority from the prior Japanese Patent Application No. 2000-333971, filed Oct. 31, 2000, the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to management of shared information that is shared among a plurality of users via a network, more specifically, the invention relates to an information management method for plural users to exchange shared information and an information management device that makes the most thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, as one example of systems employed in information exchanges among plural users via a network, well known is (1) a system wherein accumulated information such as documents and the like accumulated on a database is maintained by plural users in collaboration, and updated contents, messages and the like added to this accumulated information are notified to certain users.
In a system for managing accumulated information like the (1), since editing existing accumulated information is the base of its operation, the contents of messages sent to users are limited to results of editing work or notices of messages, accordingly there has been a problem that a lively discussion is unlikely to happen around a certain topic of information as a base.
While, as another example, well known is (2) a system including a mailing list, a bulletin board system, and the like, wherein flow type communications in which a user sends a message and other users reply to it and messages are exchanged among users are supported.
Such a flow information oriented system as the (2) is employed for lively communications among users. For example, a familiar example of this type of system is a bulletin board system wherein discussions are made around the contents of a homepage on WWW of internet. In such systems in the prior art, however, when a large amount of flow information is registered at one time, users have to read all the information chips one after another in order to grasp the contents, which has been a problem with the prior art. In some of mailing lists and the like, volunteer users post summarized messages in response to messages that have so far show up there, nevertheless, such messages will end up to bury themselves in a huge amount of other messages as part of flow information. Difficulties in mediating discussions will lead to difficulties in bring discussions to a conclusion, and also lead to difficulties for new users to such systems to grasp the flow of discussions made so far there, which had been another problem in the prior art.
On the other hand, there is a demand for finely setting the scope where the respective items of information are shared, in consideration of sharing information in a specified organization. For example, there may be a case where it is intended that users who can participate in discussions in a mailing list should be limited to users belonging to a certain group, and at the same time, stock information obtained as results of discussions should be made public also to the outside of the group.
In the systems as the (1) and (2), many of them fail to provide a method to flexibly set whether or not to make public the information shared in a certain group to other users out of the group.
As mentioned above, in those systems conventionally employed for information exchanges among plural users via a network, it has been difficult to accumulate and manage the transitions of discussions through exchanging messages in correspondence with documents created, edited, and read in the discussions, by connecting flow information of messages to documents created as one fruit summarizing message contents, and accumulated documents and the like referred to in messages.
Consequently, for example, the work to summarize the contents of messages exchanged among plural users as flow information in a specific user group into a single document has been left to a volunteer user, who in creating such a document requires a great amount of labor to analyze and summarize all the transitions of flow information by himself, as a result, creation of a document as the result of discussions has been unlikely to be dame lively, which has been still another problem with the prior art.
Even in the environment where such problems as mentioned above have been solved in respective user groups, there is still a problem that exchanges among plural user groups cannot be made flexibly in making public worthy information obtained as the result of discussions by flow information in a user group consisting of specific participants and part of information now under discussions to the outside of the user group. That exchanges among plural user groups cannot be made flexibly may cause opinion exchanges about a topic that relates to plural groups not to be made easily, and even for discussions in each user group to be piled up.
Further, when there are plural user groups that exchange discussions on a specific topic, users who are going to participate in these groups find it difficult to know in which user group they should take part, as a consequence, the number of new users to user groups may not increase, leading to stagnation of discussions in user groups, which has been still other problem seen in the prior art.
The present invention has been made in consideration of the problems in the prior art, accordingly, an object of the present invention is to provide an information management method and an information management device that enables, in an environment wherein, in plural user groups to discuss about a specific topic, documents and messages posted, updated, and referred to in discussions are managed in correspondence with transitions of discussions by messages exchanged among users as members of each user groups as shared information of the user group, to flexibly conduct exchanges among plural user groups via this shared information, and to promote the participation of new users to respective user groups.
According to one aspect of the present invention, there is provided a document management method for, concerning the document that can be owned jointly by the respective users of the plural terminal devices via a network, renewing the document by reflecting an editing intention shown by each of the users while managing the renewal history of the document. The method comprises generating a community in which an access authority is controlled; generating a plurality of message trees in the community, each of which accepts a message from users using the terminal devices, the message being in reply to the other message in the message tree; editing a plurality of documents each of which is associated with one of the message trees; generating additive message subjected to a change within one of the documents, the additive message being written into the corresponding message tree by one of the users who made the change; generating a bidirectional reference between the additive message and the corresponding document; and searching for one of the documents as an instructive knowledge for at least one of the users in the community, wherein the corresponding massage tree is referred to by the one of users using the found document.